Month: September 2016

 
From The Intersection of Madness and Reality:

In a country where then presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama, was ridiculed for not wearing a flag pin, the backlash Colin Kaepernick is receiving, makes perfect sense. After all, like Obama, Kaepernick is also black. And, as whiteness would have it, black people in America, should be forever thankful to be American. Because, of course, if we weren’t rescued by white men in their pretty cruise ships, life would truly suck in Africa.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

Hillary Clinton got “busted” telling a little bit of not-quite-politically-correct truth regarding who she sees Trump supporters as–she commented that about half of them are in “a basket of deplorables”.

Huh. This just seems to me like a furtherance of her comments regarding the symbiosis between the Trump campaign and the alt-right. Nothing much new here. She later pulled back on the statement, but only to the effect that labeling half the Trump supporters as deplorable is probably a bit too high. (Or is it?) But I think the outcry regarding what she said is pretty overwrought. She did not say “half of all Americans”–she was referring to about half of Trump supporters, which is a pool of likely voters according to most polls smaller than her group of supporters.

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From Green Eagle:

The Republicans, I mean, as the vicious, traitorous fascist Trump pulls nearly even with Hillary. This is, of course, because if you read the mainstream press, you will discover that it is appropriate to be suspicious and filled with contempt toward Hillary, because of an endless series of phony scandals with no substance behind any of them, while Trump gets caught bribing two State Attorneys General to drop criminal prosecutions for fraud against him, and he makes an utter fool of himself in Mexico, and the press just ignores it. And to complete the picture, even the members of the media who do notice things like this will do anything to attribute it to the wrong cause.

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From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

Gov. Scott Walker and some Republican legislators are supporting the creation of a sales tax holiday for school supplies. If all goes according to plan, the temporary exemption on sales taxes will be included in the 2017-18 state budget.

The timing of the announcement is not accidental. The bill for school supplies is still fresh in the minds of many parents. It’s also only two months until Election Day, so the happy news for consumers will be one more tally on the sheet for voting Republican.

The popularity of these sales tax holidays should be a caution to those Republicans who support replacing the income tax (state or federal) with the sales tax. While some economists prefer the tax on consumption rather than income, and some politicians make false promises of abolishing the IRS in the process, the unpopularity of the tax is evident in the 20 states that currently have the holiday.

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• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors follows up on the Clinton/Trump National Security debate, moderated after a fashion by Matt Lauer, with a summary of the summaries of the joint encounter.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass suggests that hatred toward Hillary Clinton has virtually nothing to do with her own actions, and somewhat less to do with Republicans than we might think.
   
• Infidel753 reports on an under covered corruption story that has the virtue of being fact-based. It seems a sizable portion of campaign donations to the Trump campaign is flowing away from the campaign, into Trump business accounts.
   
• Human Voices reacts to the sit down demonstration about the National Anthem by Colin Kaepernick and the show of support by a handful of fellow athletes with frustration about perspective.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged, has a well rounded eulogy to mark the passing of Phyllis Schlafly.
   

The Serious Side of the Corner Taco Truck

We laugh at the absurd warning. Our society will be overtaken by a Taco culture.

But there is a deadly serious side, in our politics and in our history.

Transcript

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From Max’s Dad:

I am sitting here in the Midwest, home of tornadoes and floods and other natural disasters like endless Republican morons winning elected offices, but never something as California as an earthquake. But there I am, at 7:02am on a Saturday morning, working in a 12 story building on floor 8 when my desk begins to rock back and forth.

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From Glenn Geist at MadMikesAmerica:

You watch them sitting there, some in VFW hats looking like aged Boy Scouts trying to sit through a lecture on Balbus-Hawley Instability without falling asleep or revealing total incomprehension. Some of them like lobotomy patients nodding together from their rocking chairs on some asylum veranda. They have mostly little questions about how the presidential hopeful would solve things a president has nothing to do with: how would you end discrimination, how would you end poverty and change human nature?

The moderator tries hard to control his anger as the candidate evades every question and every unsuccessful attempt to put the question back on the podium. The men in funny hats nod.

In living rooms all over the nation there are those so outraged they will spend a sleepless night pretending they can respond to suggestions that the centuries old strife in the Middle East began with Hillary Clinton and her invention of the Islamic State, her autocratic and premature withdrawal of American troops from a decade old occupation.

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From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:

Hello, everyone. The third quarter fundraising drive for FREE SPEECH TV has just begun, and I want to stress just how vitally important this network is to us and why it is our duty as progressives to keep it on the air! As you can see from the staff photo above, this fabulous independent media outlet is completely staffed by only a few very intelligent and dedicated individuals – many of whom are millennials or near-millennials.

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From The Intersection of Madness and Reality:

There ain’t no white man in this room that will change places with me — and I’m rich. That’s how good it is to be white. There’s a one-legged busboy in here right now that’s going: ‘I don’t want to change. I’m gonna ride this white thing out and see where it takes me.’ — Chris Rock

Colin Kaepernick has received a tremendous amount of (racist) backlash because of his refusal to stand during the national anthem. In his words, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told the media after the game. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way… There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” Personally, I find the negative backlash against Kaepernick indicative of the fact that we live in a white supremacist society. Let us be clear here: racism is about “whiteness,” it is about “white people.”

From my perspective and, I would venture the perspective of many African Americans and Latino, Kaepernick is speaking out about a factual aspect of life in white America. Racism exists.

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